I catalog and analyze creepy horror videos over at ScaryShorts.com. Contact me at rohan@scaryshorts.com with fanmail, comments, and writing gig offers.
While we don't expect our bad guys to be infallible geniuses, we at least expect them to not be actively tripping all over themselves like Super Dave Osborne.
At their best, these movies are about extraordinary situations that require extraordinary men. At their worst, these plots were kicked into gear by people who sucked at their jobs.
People tend to be incompetent in movies -- that's how our heroes are able to make so many daring escapes. However, some plotlines are dependent on downright boneheaded incompetence.
We've seen movies about aliens doing it with human women, 100-year-old vampires dating high school teens and Woody Allen hooking up with young starlets, among other unlikely atrocities. And yet, somehow, the writers always find new ways to top themselves.
There's no easier way to make a movie character likeable than by having him heroically sacrifice his own life. Of course, sometimes 'heroically' means 'stupidly.'
In a lot of cases, the bad guy is just an excuse for the hero to do stuff, and so the writers are forced to come up with some flimsy explanation for why this particular guy has chosen to do things that are bad ... even when there are much better and easier ways to accomplish what he wants.
In a rapidly shrinking world, it's becoming more and more important to have translations that are both lightning-fast and actually understandable. Of course, nobody told that to these people.
Writing movies is hard -- we try to point that out in every article like this. And occasionally, the writer will write his characters into a corner, where they can be rescued only by some new science, device or technology. Once they're out of the jam, the tech is usually immediately forgotten. The problem is, sometimes the device itself should have
